Hillary Clinton’s blast from the past

The trove of personal papers in which Hillary Clinton’s late best friend documented their conversations on everything from Monica Lewinsky to the media lit up cable news and Twitter. It provided an unusually stark and intimate look at the former first lady through admiring eyes — but also served as a reminder that the currently popular Clinton was once one of the most polarizing figures in the nation, someone who could galvanize Republican donors and grass roots almost instantly.

But that was then. And in an era when political controversies tend to flame out in the blink of a news cycle, it’s unclear whether the provocative papers about Clinton’s musings and doings from decades ago will matter to voters if she runs in 2016.

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Reince Priebus: 'Truckload' against Hillary Clinton

“Political reporters love to pore over these sorts of things, but they have little to no impact on candidates that are already well-defined,” said Ben LaBolt, a former Barack Obama White House and campaign spokesman. “It’s much harder to redefine a candidate that is already well-known. That comes with advantages and disadvantages — it’s also harder to win new supporters over.”

Clinton’s advisers declined to respond to emails for this story, and they have yet to comment publicly about the archived papers of Diane Blair, who died in 2000 and has been called the sister Clinton wished she’d had. The conservative-leaning Washington Free Beacon reported on the documents in a buzzy story published Sunday night, describing them as “correspondence, diaries, interviews, strategy memos, and contemporaneous accounts of conversations with the Clintons ranging from the mid-1970s to the turn of the millennium.”

Blair’s husband donated the documents to the University of Arkansas, and some were unsealed in 2010.

David Axelrod, a longtime Obama adviser, agreed that such blasts from the past will have little effect.

“This strikes me as warmed over seconds from Drudge’s table that already were baked in the cake,” he said. “I don’t think it will have any bearing.”

The documents landed at a time when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who’s made no secret of his interest in a 2016 presidential run of his own, has invoked Bill Clinton’s sexual past in recent weeks, describing the former president as a “sexual predator.” Paul clearly relished his role as the instigator of a conversation aimed at reminding voters of the Clinton White House-era dramas.

“I don’t see how someone just gets a free pass on anything. I mean, especially in today’s politics. So, I think we’re going to have a truckload of opposition research on Hillary Clinton and some things may be old and some things might be new. But I think everything is at stake when you’re talking about the leader of the free world and who we’re going to give the keys to run the United States of America.”

But David Brock, the founder of Media Matters and American Bridge and a Clinton ally who is leading a new effort, “Correct the Record,” with the primary goal of defending the former secretary of state, said Republicans are showing desperation by seizing on the papers.

“It’s clear now that the Republicans have nothing of substance to say about Secretary Clinton,” he told POLITICO. “That’s why they’re running a retro-channel, an endless feedback loop of dreck. The Republicans — including Rand Paul — do have a substantive record on issues of real concern to women that ought to be the subject of public debate.”

He added, “Not surprisingly, the Washington Free Beacon gets even the top-line of its story — the idea that the archive of Hillary Clinton’s friend portrays Hillary as ‘ruthless’ — wrong. The characterization is actually from a polling memo which also noted that people ‘admired the strength of the Arkansas first couple.’ Everything else in the archive is old news.”